The giant rift in the Larsen C ice shelf has advanced more than 6 miles since January 1st, the MIDAS project announced on Friday.

What might become one of the largest icebergs ever hangs by a thread from Antarctica's Larsen C ice shelf.

The vast rift has grown more than 6 miles longer since January 1, leaving an area reportedly the size of Delaware connected to the main shelf by a mere 10 percent of the total length, the British MIDAS project announced Thursday. Its loss threatens to destabilize the fourth-largest Antarctic ice shelf.

When exactly that will be is unknowable, according to project leader and Swansea University glaciologist Adrian Luckman: "Although you might expect any extension to hasten the point of calving, it actually remains impossible to predict when it will break because the fracture process is so complex," he told BBC News. "My feeling is that this new development suggests something will happen within weeks to months, but there is an outside chance that further growth will be slow for longer than that.”

This break has been a long time coming, as The Christian Science Monitor reported earlier this week: what began as a tiny crack in the 1960s is now 90 miles wide, and almost one-third of a mile deep. Most of that change has taken place in just the past few years...

Americans are peerless creators of national myths. It's a gestalt psychology, a self-organizing collective mind, indifferent to actual events or circumstances.

Friday, hours before Donald Trump laid his hand on the Lincoln Bible, and a second Bible given to him by his mother, an inauguration myth was taking form on the television airwaves.

It went something like this:

Americans of all persuasions had streamed from across their exceptional country, beloved by God and unique in the world, to their capital city, where they'd filled the streets, eager to witness the peaceful transition of power to a freely elected leader, divisions set aside for a shining moment, standing as one before the very foundation of history's truest democracy, setting an example to all other nations.